Some folks were watching Colbert talk about the student debt crisis and I asked if Colbert mentioned that it was all Joe's fault. Joe championed the 2005 bill that made discharging student debts in bankruptcy illegal, which escalated the already dire tuition problems and created the student debt crisis.
To me, there's a pretty straight lne of causality there; joe does something horrible and then a few years later there is a massive predictable disaster.
Since Joe championed the bill and worked hard to make it happen, since he holds great political power, he's personally responsible for the student debt crisis. He is answerable, as an individual, for what happened.
The folks were like "nah, it's not joe's fault, it'd been happening since blah blah blah Reagan state colleges".
I don't really understand how people assign guilt and fault and responsibilty. For me - person with power does or supports bad thing, so they are at fault and can be made to answer for what happened. But lots of people get cross with me for treating Biden the same way i'd treat someone who reduced millions of people to debt peonage or murdered hundreds of thousands of people or whatever. Like kill one person you're a monster, but at some point ordering the murder of vast numbers of people creates no moral stain?
This all came to mind, really, bc I saw a picture of Jenny McCarthy. McCarthy going on Oprah to peddle anti-vax bullshit bc she hated her son is, afaik, where anti-vax really broke in to the main-stream. And the direct result is i have acne from wearing a mask to avoid long covid. McCarthy and Winfrey, as much as any two individuals can, hold responsibility for bringing that about by bringing McCarthy's anti-science hatred of autistic people and the related anti-vax bs to a vast audience. Someone else could have done it, it might have happened without them, but Winfrey did use her massive platform to throw open the gates of hell, so she's responsible.
It's always seemed pretty clear cut to me. You do a thing, what happens next, forseeable or not, is your fault and responsibiliy. You give an order and you are morally culpable for what your minions do next, regardless of whether they did what you intended. You assume an office and you're responsible, personally, for every single thing done in the name and on the authority of that office. That's just how power works. If you wield it then you did it, then it's your fault, even if you directed someone else's hand to wield the knife.
Fatalists forget that the material conditions that shape history include the people involved. The bill took the specific shape it did because Biden was involved. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but the specifics would certainly be different. Each person involved changes the material conditions because we are material too.
There's also the "someone would have done it, but it didn't have to be you" thing. Yeah, lots of people lined up to do the bad thing, but you got in the line. You didn't have to. You made a choice and you can't just handwave "historical circumstances" as though nebulous historical forces handed you the knife and moved your arm. Like a child soldier can be like "yeah i had no meaningful agency here" but not Brandon or Obama or whatever other truly powerful villain.
I agree. It’s why I’d still kill baby Hitler if I had the opportunity. Even if another one takes his place, I’d travel back in time and kill him too if that was a choice. Just because there’s a long line of fascists willing to carry on a similar agenda doesn’t mean you stop attempting to make that line shorter. It’s just that other things contribute to its length as well.